Women

The role of women in society and in the labor force changed considerably over the period. Near midcentury, state after state passed laws giving women clearer title to property, the right to engage in business, secure rights to their earnings, and property rights to patents and intellectual property. As Zorina Kahn’s (1996) research on patents and commercial activities of nineteenth-century women shows, American women were highly responsive to legal and institutional changes that opened doors for their creativity and commercial and market participation. By 1880, 2.5 million women, constituting 15 percent of the workforce, were at work outside the home; by 1900, 5.3 million, constituting 18 percent and by 1920, 8.5 million, constituting 20 percent.

Sales work in city stores and professional work, particularly teaching, became attractive alternatives to domestic service. The typewriter, which was introduced shortly after the Civil War, ushered in an office revolution that took hold in the 1890s. By the turn of the century, the typewriter and other office equipment had created a major field of

FIGURE 18.2 Real Earnings of Nonfarm Employees

Source: Data taken from Stanley Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record Since 1800 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 524. Published in 1964 by The McGraw-Hill Companies.

Employment for young women. As Elyce Rotella (1981b, 52) has shown, clerical workers as a percentage of the nonagricultural workforce grew from 1.2 to 9.2 percent between 1870 and 1920, while women as a percentage of all clerical workers grew from 2.5 to 49.2 percent.

The office, however, remained segregated by sex. Women were confined to routine clerical jobs, while personal secretaries and other decision-making jobs remained a male province. The new clerical jobs were also segregated by race: Black women were rarely hired. Segregation was also the norm for the industrial workforce. Milliners (hat makers) were generally women, whereas meatpackers were generally men; in cotton textiles, an industry in which about 50 percent of the workforce was female, spoolers (who transferred thread from the bobbins on which it was wound) were almost all women. The segregation of the labor force had some roots in economic differences between men and women: The labor force attachment of women was often less than for men. Thus, some firms that did not want to invest in training workers who would soon leave found it convenient to treat women and men as separate classes, even though these firms sometimes made the error of promoting the less able worker by doing so. But the main sources of sex and race segregation were powerful social norms that dictated the limited opportunities for women and African Americans.

These social norms, however, were being gradually eroded by economic forces and political opposition. Typing and sales work, for example, even as they confined women to subsectors of the labor force, changed traditional thinking about the role of women. World War I further shook the ideologies that underlay segregated hiring: Urged to employ women as replacements for men lost to the armed services, employers discovered that women performed a wide range of occupations as satisfactorily as men and that in some jobs their performance was often superior. It would take another half century, however, for the ideologies that segregated the workplace to begin to crumble on a major scale.

In 1886, limited demand and financial difficulties forced Philo Remington to sell his typewriter company. By 1890, the boom was on, remaking the office and bringing large numbers of women into the paid labor force.

Statutes prescribing maximum hours and minimum wages for women were common at the state level by 1920. These were motivated in part by growing concerns about the physical surroundings in which women worked and the effects on their health and their ability to care for their children. The statutes were also supported by trade union leaders, who hoped that limiting the hours women could work would limit competition with male workers and, in some cases, also might limit the hours of male workers whose jobs were complementary with those of female workers. Indeed, empirical studies reveal that wage and hour restrictions for women served to limit the hours worked by both male and female workers. The effect on women’s employment, moreover, was negligible: Few employers decided not to hire women simply because their hours were regulated (Goldin 1990, 195-199).